Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Boring

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Myra Breckenridge has everything you don't want to see in a movie from start to finish. The comedy is Disturbing, Offensive, Obscene and just Sickening. I didn't even want to see the ending it was that bad, but I had to keep strong and I'm never watching this move again in my life. Why did all these big star even agree to this movie, huh? Rachael Welch, John Carradine, even George Furth. Although there we Big Star in this movie before they were big stars like: Farrah Fawcett and Tom Selleck, and I say sorry to you two for even being in the credits of this movie. I don't know why some people consider this a Cult Film because there is nothing in this movie that people can relate to, not even the sexual content or the Characters.

I don't think Myra Beckinridge is quite as bad as its reputation suggests. However that's not saying very much, as a film it is an interesting curiosity but also its a mess. Starting with the good things, I liked the soundtrack and some of the fashions and scenery. Farrah Fawcett and Mae West are decent, and Raquel Welch also gives a good performance despite having some of the worst lines of the film. On the other hand, what Myra Breckinridge suffers from especially are scenes that jump wildly and frequently all over the place with no smoothness, this is both in editing and storytelling and the incoherent script. The story was interesting at first glance, but became very disjointed, while the direction fares no better. The film is only about 95 or so minutes, but because the pace is so uneven sometimes it feels longer. The rest of the cast are not good at all, Red Reed is horrible, Roger Herren is bland and John Huston-who I love both as an actor and director-is overbearing and chews the scenery to pieces. Overall, Myra Breckinridge is interesting, but it is a mess as well. 4/10 Bethany Cox

When the blight of Catholic censorship fell like an axe on Hollywood in July of 1934, Mae West was, if not the chief cause, at least Exhibit A in the case against movie smut. 42 years old and at her eye-rolling prime, she was in the middle of making "It Ain't No Sin" -- and there are no prizes for guessing what "it" was. Filming was suspended and she was forced to rewrite her outrageous, lowdown script two or three times before it could be approved. After that, the censors clamped down on her more with each film, and her huge popularity slowly evaporated.In 1968, the ratings system drove the last nail into the Production Code, and suddenly you could put anything on the screen -- even "Myra Breckinridge," an incoherent mess of a novel featuring transsexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, female-on-male rape, and free-floating camp sensibility... to which the movie added Vietnam-era American self-hatred, anti-Hollywood vitriol, and Mae West.But hey, maybe that's what happens when you bottle up your impulses for 34 years. To me, it seems entirely appropriate that the woman most responsible for censorship should sashay back on screen to headline this carnival of perversion and bad taste. Amid its flailing about, "Myra Breckinridge" half-heartedly tries to excuse itself as some kind of expression of Woman Power. But Mae West, moaning and clutching herself while black dancers gyrate behind her, simply IS woman power. And as ever, she's so rapturously in love with herself she can hardly stop grinning with pleasure. Yeah, she's almost 80, and a lot of people seem hung up on that. Don't they notice she addresses the age issue herself? "I'm a little tired today," she tells her assistant. "One of these boys will have to go."In today's post-shame America, old age is the last taboo. It's a beautiful thing to watch Mae West demonstrate that it ain't no sin.

This movie is so bad it's awful. I'm amazed that screenwriter David Giler actually went on to write good films, like "The Parallax View" and "Aliens." In fact, I'm amazed that he and co-writer/director Michael Sarne - or anyone else connected with this abomination - were ever able to find work in the industry again.I never read Gore Vidal's novel, so I can't compare that story to what I saw on the screen, but I'm guessing the book was just a tad more coherent. I'm really not sure what the movie was all about, actually. I think it involved a man named Myron (Rex Reed) who had a sex change operation and became Myra (Raquel Welch), who then set out to redefine the rules of gender and sexuality while taking over her uncle's acting school. I think.Poor Raquel Welch. She was never much of a thespian to begin with, but in this movie, she's saddled with page after page of inane dialogue that she attempts to recite with some kind of strange accent that's a mix between British and Central Park Society Woman. The result is truly embarrassing for the sex goddess. On top of that, she's forced to wear incredibly garish costumes that even Jean Paul Gauthier on LSD would never dream of designing.John Huston, as Uncle Buck Loner, the owner of a failing acting school that for no discernible reason appears to be set up on an old Western movie back lot, looks and sounds drunk throughout most of the film. Can't say I blame him. To go from directing "The Maltese Falcon" to playing a delusional, 50-gallon-hat-wearing cowboy would make anyone hit the bottle.Then there's Mae West. Oh, boy. She essentially reprises the oversexed, double-entendre-cracking character that made her famous in the 1930s. Only she's 77 in this movie, and it's just kinda pathetic. To make it worse, she actually tries to sing two songs, and during one tune, she looks like she's either chewing gum or attempting to slip her dentures back into place with her tongue. Her role as the lascivious talent agent Leticia Van Allen makes absolutely no sense in this movie - she barely interacts with the principle cast members, and her character contributes nothing to the plot. She's there for a while, then she's gone.When you can say that Rex Reed, Farrah Fawcett (looking so young and so gorgeous, by the way), and Roger Herren's naked butt deliver the three best performances in this movie, it should give you a good indication of just how terrible the whole thing is.Technically, the movie looks and sounds like it was put together by a group of elementary school students. The editing is sloppy, the dialogue looping (and there's a lot of it) is obvious and poorly executed, the camera work is sophomoric, and the music is excruciating (cover your ears when Mae starts belting).Some say "Myra Breckenridge" is an underrated classic. No way. It's just garbage disguised as an avante garde experiment.